It seems a lot of companies are excited about the possibilities of whitebox networking. This applies not just to inside the data center, but outside as edge devices as well. I’ve never really considered that as a possibility. Kevin Myers outlines a bit of the history of whitebox networking, and what he’s seeing to convince him that they’re rapidly moving to the edge.

Riverbed is working in the growing field of SD-WAN. The SD-WAN space seems like it’s ready to explode in 2017. I’m on record as predicting we’ll see the space’s first big IPO this year. Riverbed is growing within the space, having acquired another SD-WAN company, Ocedo, a little over a year ago. The company now has over 300 customers and is currently providing about 1,600 free trials of their software. They’ve been around in the WAN optimization market for a while, and are now starting to combine the two solutions in unified devices.

At Networking Field Day, Juniper Networks gave details and a technical deep dive into their Junos operating system for their routers. They specifically went into great detail about some of the automation now available. It’s genuinely impressive. But I really enjoyed how the presentation started.

Kentik takes an interesting approach to monitoring. They know a lot of people aren’t thrilled with tools taking in NetFlow data, as it doesn’t really work great with the rest of the networking toolset. The company didn’t want to throw NetFlow out with the bathwater. Instead, they try to throw a broad a net as possible to gather as many metrics on network performance as possible.

The big problem with a DDoS, especially one like Mirai, is how to discern real users in all that volume. If you simply “cut the hardline” and shut the network off, the DDoS was effectively successful, bringing you offline and disrupting business. Mirai made this particularly difficult, with it’s glut of IoT devices directed at the target. An effective solution needs to be able to keep your network running, and identify legitimate traffic from the noise. Enter Big Switch Networks’ BigSecure Architecture.

I saw Barefoot Networks at Networking Field Day last week. And the primary takeaway I got was how hard it is to design a standard network switch, and ASICs in general. What I never realized was the latency involved in this process, which is kind of funny for networking equipment. They laid out the problem as enterprise customers go to the network equipment companies and ask for a feature. If it’s a big customer or enough people ask for it, the equipment folks need to go to their software team to see how they are going to implement this, then go to their ASIC team to have this designed into their hardware. After all this time (often several years), the equipment maker then produces the switch. This equipment is now many years delayed from when that feature was needed, which is now locked into the hardware, and enters a completely different networking landscape. Barefoot Networks totally rethinks this idea.

Abstraction as a tool is nothing new. But a new trend I’m seeing from recent events is combining it with intentionality. This moves the abstraction from a tool to overview complexity, and into the ability to manage and direct it. At Networking Field Day this week, I saw such an implementation from Anuta Networks and their NCX network orchestration solution

Welcome to new year of Networking news from Gestalt IT. In our first newsletter of the year:
– The flaws of Google Fiber
– 2017 Predictions
– The issue of network shaming
Plus looks at ThousandEyes, Netbeez, and more!